This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Music and time in Theodor W. Adorno Bacht, Nikolaus The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 06. Oct. 2021 Music and Time 0 in Theodor W. Adorno NIKOLAUS BACHT Doctoral Dissertation, presented to the Department of Mitsic, King's College, University of London 2002 fii ( LcDIN, Synopsis Music and Tinie in TheodorW, Adorno offers an analysis of Adorno's entire musicological and philosophical output, including unpublished typescripts. In the first chapter, Tinie and Musical Materialis"i, key temporal-philosophical premises are extracted from Adorno's journalistic publications from the 1920s. Adorno's endeavour in the 1930s to define more precisely the categories he developed in the 1920s is examined in the second chapter, Presencein Wagner.The third chapter, ModernihY (is Eternal Recurrenceof the Sanie, provides an analysis of Adorno's major works from the 1940s, Dialectic of Enlightennient, Mindina Moralia and Philosophyof Neu) Music. Chapter IV, Writing Tinle, elaborates with reference to Adorno's mature writings a linear narrative about music from the Middle Ages to the Darmstadt School in order to reveal the temporalising strategies of his music historiography. The fifth and final chapter, 'Owrconiing'Tinie, ventures into metaphysical terrain. 2 Contents Acknowledgments 5 ............................................................................................ Introduction 6 ..................................................................................................... 1. The Hypothesis Study 6 of this .............................................................. 2. Method 8 ................................................................................................... 3. Structure 13 ............................................................................................... Chapter I- Time Musical Materialism (1920-1932) 15 and .......................... 1. Introduction 15 ......................................................................................... 2. Adorno's Opposition to Heidegger Kant 16 and ................................ 3. Adorno's Early Writings Music 25 on .................................................. 4. A Metaphysics Transitoriness 44 of ...................................................... Chapter 11 Presence in Wagner (1933-1940) 51 - ............................................ 1. Introduction 51 ......................................................................................... 2. Adorno's Temporal-Dimensional Figure 52 ........................................ 3. The Sources Versuch fiber Wagner 59 of ................................................. 4. Temporal-Dimensional Movements in Wagner 60 ............................. 5. Adorno's Wagner Analyses 72 .............................................................. Same Chapter III - Modernity as Eternal Recurrence of the (1941-1948) 85 ................................................................................................ 1. Introduction 85 ......................................................................................... 2. Eternal Recurrence of the Same in Dialectic of Enlightennient Minitita Moralia 86 and ............................................................................ 3. Eternal Recurrence the Same in the Culture Industry 96 of .............. 4. Eternal Recurrence the Same in Philosophy New Music 103 of of ....... 3 Chapter IV Writing Time: Adorno's Historiography Music 120 - of ......... 1. Introduction 120 ....................................................................................... 2. Before Beethoven 121 .............................................................................. 3. Beethoven 128 ........................................................................................... 4. Between Beethoven Schoenberg 137 and ............................................. 5. Schoenberg his Contemporaries 148 and ............................................. 6. After Schoenberg 162 .............................................................................. Chapter V 'Overcoming' Time: Adorno's Metaphysics Music 168 . of ..... 1. Introduction 168 ....................................................................................... 2. Music Negative Dialectics 169 and ....................................................... 3. Redeeming Illusion 177 ........................................................................... Chronology TheodorW, Adorno's Writings 190 of ............................................. Bibliography 243 .................................................................................................. 4 Acknowledgements I thank the British Acadeniyand the King's CollegeLondon Research Fund for enabling me to lock myself away for years in ivory towers on both sides of the Atlantic; and Gabriele Ewenz, Michael Schwarz and Rolf Tiedemann from the TheodorýV. Adorno und lValter Benjanlin Archiv in Frankfurt am Main for allowing me sight of all sources relevant for my research. I would also like to thank the scholars at King's College London and Harvard University who granted me the privilege of their supervision: John Deathridge, who was in fact much more than a supervisor; Chris Thornhill, who gave lavishly of his time and enthusiasm; Daniel Chua, whose creativity and wit have greatly inspired me; and Reinhold Brinkmann, who provided sharp insight and warm support at a particularly critical stage. Finally, I owe thanks to my friends Brian Brock, Trevor Watt and Martin Wendte for commenting on early chapter drafts; to Robert Kowalenko, an analytical philosopher, for not insisting too much on his belief that Adorno's books and everything else written in Hegelian language should be shelved under 'science fiction'; and to some other persons for helping me in ways often even more unique to themselves. 5 PAGE NUMBERING AS ORIGINAL Introduction Dazzled by intricate conceptual paradoxes and a powerful rhetoric, Adorno scholars often tend to oversee the obvious. The notion, for instance, that music is a temporal art, has never been used as the basis of an investigation of Adorno's writings. The author of the present study is convinced that exactly this apparently trivial and commonplace notion forms the key problem of Adorno's philosophy, leading directly and deeply into the centre of his thought. To verify this hypothesis, the present study traces the effect of temporal concepts in Adorno's specific version of materialist dialectics, negative dialectics. The hypothesis is associatedwith another one, namely that Adorno's project of a negative temporalisation of dialectics and, more generally, his intellectual development, are crucially conditioned by experiences with musical time. The author takes a twofold perspective on this task. On the one hand, he intends to provide a useful morphology of Adorno's ideas on time. On the other hand, he aims at a fundamental-critical deconstruction. For particularly with reference to temporal concepts, one can demonstrate that a great deal of what Adorno wrote was motivated by strategy rather than by an interest in the object. Reconstruction and deconstruction, however, go hand in hand and cannot be neatly separated. Moreover, where others would use harsh critical language to make their mark, the author will only intervene with subtle hints and rely upon the intellectual sensitivity of the reader. 6 Introduction If Adorno scholars have anything in common, it is their attraction to blinds intricacies and paradoxes -a fatal attraction indeed, for it us to apparent trivialities and commonplaces that may lead far more directly and deeply into the elusive conceptual centre of his thought. The simple notion, for instance, that music is a temporal art, has never been used as tthe basis of an investigation of Adorno's writings. The author of the present study is convinced that exactly this simple notion forms the central problem of Adorno's philosophy. To verify this hypothesis, the present study traces the effect of temporal concepts in Adorno's specific version of materialist dialectics, negative dialectics. The hypothesis is associatedwith another one, namely that Adorno's project of a negative temporalisation of dialectics in particular and his intellectual development